Shat
terd
Men
The
hidden half of domestic violence
How
to have eternal life
A Letter To DART
Several hundred DART buses feature misleading,
father-bashing ads purporting to address the serious issue of domestic
violence. One ad depicts a happy little girl with the message "One day my
husband will kill me." Another shows a smiling boy with the message
"When I grow up, I will beat my wife."
This ad campaign is in conjunction with The Family
Place however, much of what is being presented to the public in
these ads is very misleading to say the least. Much of the
statistics on the The Family Place website are distorted. These are but
two of them that I will address:
The Surgeon General’s Workshop on Violence and Public
Health reports that domestic violence is the number one cause of injury
to women in the United States —more than rapes, muggings and auto accidents
combined.
One often-cited study is a Journal of the
American Medical Association study in a large urban hospital (Detroit).
But a more recent JAMA-cited
study found a virtually equal prevalence of domestic violence for
male and female ED patients.
Only 1.85% of women's emergency room visits are
due to domestic violence (37% of 5% - all forms of
violence account for only 5% of ER visits.)
According to the FBI,
a woman is beaten in this country every 15 seconds.
There is absolutely no basis in fact for this
statement. While it has become an often-used factoid (sometimes the number
is 9 seconds, or six) it is not accurate. It is also variously reported as
coming from the FBI, Department of Justice data, the UN, the Commonwealth
Fund, or simply, "studies." The organizations referenced
have never compiled data in this fashion or issued such a statement.
The original factoid (then 17 seconds) was
extrapolated from information in this report by Murray Straus, which was
compiled nearly twenty years ago and cannot have any relevance in a
discussion of today's incidence of domestic violence.
If you choose to do your own extrapolation of this
data, you will discover an incidence of 13 seconds also applies to males, a
point which is conveniently left out of the factoid circulating today.
Again, this study is so old, and society itself has changed so much it
cannot be considered relevant in 2004.
Furthermore, the FBI does not calculate, tabulate, or
track data on domestic violence.
A study conducted by scientists at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The lead
investigator was Daniel Whitaker, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist and
team leader at the National Center for Injury
Prevention and Control (which is part of the CDC).
Results were published in the May Journal of Public Health.
Whitaker
discovered, of the 24 percent of relationships that had been
violent, half had been reciprocal and half had not. Although more
men than women (53 percent versus 49 percent) had experienced
nonreciprocal violent relationships, more women than men (52
percent versus 47 percent) had taken part in ones involving
reciprocal violence.
Regarding
perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11
percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the
instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women. This
finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admitted in
their study report.
As
for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more
likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal.
And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by
men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the
men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were
women (20 percent of the time). "This is important as violence
perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious," Whitaker
and his group stressed.
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a
All
these ads will do is to instill fear into our children. Girls will be
needlessly afraid of boys and boys will develop a low self esteem and have all
hope stolen from them. This does not help stop the violence, it will increase
it because it only looks at ONE SIDE! When society depicts that
only men are the abuser, we enable women to be abusive as
they will not seek help for abusing their spouse or their children as they will
not see it as abuse. If they do, they may not seek help since they may
fear they are the only woman who is abusive and will thus feel like a freak.
If
we do not look at both sides of this issue, we will only make the problem worse.
More women are being harmed by the VAWA and its one sided approach then are
being helped. Why is it so hard to realize that girls can learn how to
abuse from their mothers just as well as boys can from their fathers? Even
worse, they also learn they can get away with it.
We
need to encourage each person who realizes they may have violent tendencies to
seek help before it becomes a crime. We can only do this by honestly
presenting the real information on domestic abuse and encouraging personal and
accountability from both men and women, not just from the men.
VAWA: Harmful To Women?
Has VAWA Delivered on its Promises to Women?
There
are some resources you can check:
http://www.mediaradar.org/
RADAR
Special Reports
Effects
of VAWA
·
Threat
to Families
·
VAWA
Discriminates Against Male Victims
·
Abuse
of Domestic Restraining Orders
·
Justice
Denied: Arrest Policies for DV
·
Bias
in the Judiciary
·
A
Culture of False Allegations
·
Has
VAWA Delivered on its Promises to Women?
Has VAWA Delivered on its Promises to Women?
Pastor Kenneth Deemer
Director Shattered Men
P.O. BOX 166
MARION INDIANA 46952-0166
JUNE is Domestic Violence Against Men Awareness
Month
(please click above to vote for
this site)
JUNE
is Domestic Violence Against Men Awareness Month